You don’t should be a middle-aged poet to unearth the world’s hidden absurdities, nevertheless it positively helps. On Armand Hammer’s new track “The Versatile Unreliability Of Time & Reminiscence,” Elucid accosts a dystopian collage of wood flutes and electrical energy flares that sound like a dying android as he notes the informal irony of people requiring robots to substantiate their identification.

Ever impressionistic, he may very well be speaking about these annoying anti-bot assessments you might need to make use of throughout an prolonged Safari session. Or possibly it’s one thing as easy as telling an Apple Retailer specialist your identify and telephone quantity to allow them to provide help to improve to an iPhone 15 — should you’re eligible. It would even be an prolonged triple-metaphor concerning the risks of conformity. In any case, he sounds genuinely disaffected. Drifting throughout the orchestral soundbed as if it’s house itself, the 42-year-old makes use of imagistic lyricism to show an obvious journey to the Apple Retailer right into a meditation on existential dread, recalling these dastardly pretend bushes and people irritating “why haven’t you made it but”s as he oscillates between the previous, current and a journey to renewed resolve.

It’s a layered examination from We Purchase Diabetic Check Strips, Elucid and billy woods’ newest joint providing as Armand Hammer. Coated in cryptic symbolism and hyper-specific, real-time reflections, the LP addresses age, gentrification (“Empire BLVD”) and the icy cruelty of capitalism (“Don’t Lose Your Job”) in an evolving world. These concepts are embodied by the title itself. We Purchase Diabetic Check Strips is a nod to uninsured diabetes sufferers who’ve to purchase unused take a look at strips as a result of they will’t afford to cop them at retail costs. Throughout New York, uninsured sufferers publish flyers with their telephone numbers to allow them to join with insured sellers to purchase the strips. Fortunately, this course of is completely authorized. Not so fortunately, it’s an indication of wealth inequalities that may’t be solved with a telephone name.

Stretching throughout 15 tracks, the album is a sonic departure from Alchemist’s stylishly soulful work on their final album, the Alchemist-assisted Haram. Right here, weighty contemplation, momentary ecstasy, and quiet tragedies are coloured by reside instrumentation and spurts of shadowy manufacturing from the likes of JPEGMAFIA, Kenny Segal, DJ Haram, Black Noi$e, EL-P, Preservation, August Fanon, Metal Tipped Dove, Youngster Actor, and Sebb Bash. Starting from frenzied jazz to psychedelic rock, it’s an eclectic palette of sounds that, when mixed with the formidable freeform writing of billy and Elucid, makes We Purchase their most experimental effort but. The beats infuse Elucid and billy’s raps with sobering pensiveness or pulsing mania. Some sounds are darker than others, however nearly all of them have an effect on the paradoxical nervousness that accompanies dwelling to see one other day. For his or her half, Elucid and billy thread disparate photographs for his or her tense ruminations.

On “Landlines,” Elucid and billy slice via eras and circumstances to see the long run. Elucid jumps between photographs of his childhood and his son’s whereas billy recollects the cautious discussions and paranoia that got here with a friendship frayed by crime. With the 2 skittering over telephone name vocal samples and a bassline that seems like a rewind, it seems like an train in time journey. “Woke Up And Requested Siri How I’m Gonna Die” sees the 2 plaster a dazed JPEGMAFIA beat with a scattered array of popular culture references. Flaunting his labyrinthine creativeness, billy turns his verse right into a barrage of careening detours, tying a sci-fi metaphor to a historic Nation of Islam determine, a resort rendezvous and an abrupt return to actuality: “I got here, I noticed, flipped a pair mitts and dipped like W.D. Fard/ Left a tip within the room with the keycards…Beat up spaceships, sliding beneath the sunshine of a useless star/ Nonetheless made my shift, appropriately lit for the graveyard.”

Whereas each will be frenetic, spontaneous and considerate, billy and Elucid take completely different approaches to verse writing for the album. Elucid tends to get extra esoteric, turning incomplete recollections into hieroglyphics with implicit meanings that depart the listener to fill the gaps. On his finish of issues, billy serves a extra tangible software of the spirit Elucid channels via his summary model of poetry. Mixed, they add dimensionality to their songs, permitting concepts to be explored on each episodic and macro-levels with nuance and symbolic rhythm. It’s a chemistry they’ve had time to excellent; they dropped their first undertaking as a duo 10 years in the past.

As they’ve since connecting, they’ve each carried world-weary views that imbue their phrases with cynicism and sensitivity; packed bins are excavated artifacts — proof of a previous life — moderately than stuff you simply put away. “Keys Beneath the Mat” seems like one thing between a clock tick and a funeral, and billy’s opening bars are the definition of fatalistic: “The whole lot that issues is finite.” And but, amid his later flurry of surrealist imagery, there’s a sliver of hope: “Our demons search each night time however some nights they will’t discover us and it’s prefer it was at first/ Flying with no pilots/ Barrel rolls within the sky, diving hand in hand, again to earth/ Free as a fowl.”

We Purchase Diabetic Check Strips doesn’t include a contented ending, however amid freewheeling experimentation and emotional bloodlettings, there’s a beleaguered seek for one. Because the years have handed and billy and Elucid’s experiences have solely expanded, their quest has develop into extra vivid — and extra layered — with each launch. You’re employed arduous for the cash solely to should work more durable to maintain it, and even should you succeed, you possibly can’t hold your neighborhood. The individuals you like will go, you’ll too; in a shapeshifting universe, all you actually have are your intentions, and even these are impermanent. Utilizing adventurous poems and emotive soundbeds, Armand Hammer’s newest is a bleak, but colourful meditation on the mechanisms of change — and the issues that gained’t.

We Purchase Diabetic Check Strips is out now on Fats Possum.